In recent years, Earth Day has evolved into an occasion for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish antitechnology dirt, and proselytize. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.

The U.K. withdrawal (“Brexit”) from the European Union drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 611 points, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Though the stock market rebounded, more unsettling news is on the way on economic, political and social fronts. Events will be startling, severe and global.

A new study published in Environment International indicates hydraulic fracturing, commonly called “fracking,” and the heavy truck traffic that is associated with it would have a negligible impact on air quality if fracking were to be used extensively in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the authors of the study appear to be a little disappointed with their findings, which may be why they decided to emphasize maximum exposure in a shorter timeframe in their study, rather than exposures over more realistic scenarios.

There is a growing body of research on the consequences of excessive land use regulation. The connection between excessive land use regulation and losses in housing affordability, has been linked to the doubling or tripling of house prices relative to incomes in places as diverse as Hong Kong, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The United States is a political anomaly. Throughout time there has never been a nation so politically, culturally, and militarily dominant. Rome, even at its height, had rivals. So too did the British Empire, which at its apex made pretense to the rule of the waves, in spite of near constant challenges to its power from forces seeking to upset or supplant it. The international stability and peace created by these great empires, the Pax Romana and Pax Britannica, the Roman Peace and the British Peace, served in their times to guarantee security and relative prosperity within their spheres of influence. Yet they could never do so unchallenged.

Panel 8 of the 9th International Conference on Climate Change was on the subject of “Costs and Benefits of Renewable Energy.” The panel was focused on the subject of renewable energy, specifically the high cost and potentially devastating economic consequences produced by the federal government’s efforts to replace the current energy sources with renewables.

With the birth of social media people have become far more interconnected to each other, and have become able to gain access to news and information with incredible rapidity. That new access has given groups unprecedented power to organize. Social networking tools have been mobilized in the United States to develop grassroots political action on a myriad of topics. It was what propelled Barack Obama to office, and it aided the swift rise and mobilization of the Tea Party.

As Americans we are blessed to live under a constitutional republican form of government, with lawmakers constrained by the dictates of a founding document that is difficult to change or subvert. The United States Constitution is the prototype of the modern written constitution of so many countries, yet it remains in many ways unsurpassed as an exercise in the construction of a lasting system for the preservation of public order and individual liberty.